The Freewheeling Podcast

Thomas Ableman
  • 5.0 (27)
  • MANAGEMENT
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

The Freewheeling Podcast is all about moving forwards faster. Each week, I’ll bring you fresh voices, new ideas and unconventional thinking. With a bias towards transport and mobility, we also span entrepreneurship and politics.

  1. 4 DAYS AGO

    GBR Customer Experience with Linda Moir and Others

    Last month, I hosted a special webinar for Transport Focus on Customer Experience in GBR. Specifically, what will it look like if GBR is a customer experience disaster - and how do we stop that happening? The specific goal was to avoid that happening by having the difficult conversations we need to have now, so we don’t need to have them then. As I was hosting it, I thought my Freewheeling Podcast listeners would love it, so here it is. I start with an interview with Linda Moir, who led customer experience at both Virgin Atlantic and London 2012. Then we have a really crunchy panel discussion with Vernon Everitt (now Commissioner of Transport for Greater Manchester) about his time at TfL, Nick Haller (who looks after Customer Experience for Europe’s best railway, Swiss Federal Railways SBB), Marie Daly (who’s already leading an integrated public sector railway at Transport for Wales), Jacqueline Starr (the rail industry’s longtime customer champion at Rail Delivery Group) and Natasha Grice (director of Transport Focus). It’s a really insightful conversation, which I wholeheartedly recommend!

    1hr 8min

  2. 29 APR

    Making a Metro Happen with Mark Barry

    There aren’t many people who’ve personally made a Metro happen. Big infrastructure products normally start with a regional or national Government drawing lines on a map. The South Wales Metro started with Mark Barry coming back from Milan and saying “we should have one of those” - and then refusing to shut up about it. Today’s episode is a fascinating account of how to make transport change happen in the real world, with powerful lessons for anyone whose role is transport change - or who just wants transport change. This is one of those episodes I particularly hope you’ll listen to.

    54 min

  3. 22 APR

    Change with Anne Marie Purcell

    It’s said that “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan”. Well, given the sucess of the Bee Network, Anne Marie Purcell has a very strong claim to parentage. She was Chief Transformation Officer at Transport for Greater Manchester throughout the period the Bee Network was mobilised. In this episode, we talk about the Bee Network (of course we do!) but we also talk about the templates for succesful change across all organisations. The Bee Network was Anne Marie’s first role in transport: she’s a change person first, and a transport person second. That makes for a fascinating conversation.

    39 min

  4. 15 APR

    Leadership with Claire Mann

    How on earth do you lead an organisation of 20,000 people with 16 transport modes and a £7 billion budget? Through people! That’s the clear answer of Claire Mann, Chief Operating Officer of Transport for London. In this highly personal episode, she unpacks her personal leadership style and why it is so effective. In the process, she explains why authenticity is so important, how she plans her work and describes her passion for public transport. Highly recommended! (Apologies for the sound quality in this episode; for various reasons we had to do it by phone).

    37 min

  5. 25 MAR

    Mini Switzerland with Thomas Ableman from YIMBYPod

    Do you listen to the YIMBYPod with James O’Malley? Well, if you do, I’ve got some alarming news for you - next week, you’ll be hearing me. James O’Malley asked me to come and tell him about Mini Switzerland, the national demonstrator of Swiss-style transport integration I’m trying to will into being in the Hope Valley. Take a listen for why I believe Mini Switzerland is so key to the future of rural transport across the UK, how the Swiss have got it so right and the way I’m hoping we can learn from them. If you want to hear more from YIMBYPod, you can find it right here.

    26 min

  6. 18 MAR

    Katie-Lee English on the Treasury

    I bet, like me, you constantly hear references to what the Treasury thinks. “The Treasury” sometimes seems to be a person in its own right, with its own opinions and culture. How did the Treasury form its culture? How does the Treasury work? How does the Treasury think? My guest this week, Katie-Lee English, spent a year working in the Treasury and talks to me about the things that have created the Treasury’s unique character.

    37 min

  7. 11 MAR

    The Oxford-Cambridge Corridor with Naomi Green

    Naomi Green has one of the toughest, and most exciting, jobs in transport today. The Oxford-Cambridge Corridor is a change programme on an extraordinary scale hidden in plain site. Both Oxford and Cambridge are expanding, driven by new Growth Companies. At least one - and possibly multiple - brand new towns are planned. The largest theme park in Europe is coming. A new railway is opening. And there’s so much more. All this is happening in a region with multiple county and district authorities, various bus operators and - currently - a mix of different rail operators. Somehow all this has to be stitched together into a coherent public and active travel proposition that ensures the economic potential can be delivered. The person in charge of bringing it all together is my guest this week, the Managing Director of England’s Economic Heartland: the sub-national transport body responsible for the OxCam Corridor. She joins me today to describe the nature of the challenge - and scale of the opportunity.

    31 min

  8. 4 MAR

    Innovation and Agility with Thomas Ableman

    I’ve spent the last couple of days at the fantastic Interchange conference in Manchester. If you weren’t there, my job is to give you FOMO for the next year so you turn up next time. The good folk at Interchange even built me a recording studio, so I was able to spend my time having what we’re calling Interchats, 15-minute short interviews with key transport changemakers as they passed through the conference floor. I’ll be dripfeeding these Interchats out over the course of the next year in addition to the regular podcast episodes. And it wasn’t just me in The Freewheeling Podcast studio, I was also joined by my Freewheeling colleague Katie-Lee English, who also recorded Interchats of her own. So here’s her first Freewheeling interview… with me!

    31 min
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About

The Freewheeling Podcast is all about moving forwards faster. Each week, I’ll bring you fresh voices, new ideas and unconventional thinking. With a bias towards transport and mobility, we also span entrepreneurship and politics.

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